[lbo-talk] Improvement, not Progress

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>And of course this invokes the whole bourgeois "Idea of Progress" 
>>(which, according to Gould, Darwin attempted explicitly to exclude 
>>from his evolutionary theory but also, unfortunately, allowed often 
>>to creep in.)
>
>That was because Darwin was a "materialist" of the kind criticized 
>in the third thesis on Feuerbach i.e. he believed reality to be made 
>up wholly of externally related meaningless fragments of matter in 
>law  determined motion.  The positivist distinction between facts 
>and values follows from this.  There is therefore no objective basis 
>for judging one set of circumstances, e.g. those in Abu Ghraib 
>prison,  to be better or worse than any other.
>
>All that could objectively be said about evolutionary development 
>was that it demonstrated "direction" i.e. you could place states in 
>the process in temporal order.  No objective grounds were available 
>for claiming that the process was "progressive" in a value sense 
>e.g. no objective basis for judging human existence to be better or 
>more valuable than the existence of rocks.  You're also 
>contradicting the position when you claim that some matter in motion 
>is sadistic torture.  It hasn't got logical space for the "causes" 
>this implies.
>
>Ted

What's in question is not if we can make a value judgment, preferring 
A to B, based on whatever criteria -- of course, we can.  The 
question is whether what comes later is necessarily better than what 
comes before, which is the basis of the ideas that history equals 
progress from lower to higher, worse to better, etc. and that, given 
time, things are destined to become better automatically, because "we 
can't stop progress."  BTW, the concept of history as progress itself 
does not supply ammunitions against the (retail and wholesale) 
torturers in the Abu Ghraib scandal.  On the contrary, the Bush team 
and right-wing pundits have been making use of the idea of history as 
progress to exonerate themselves, essentially saying that our torture 
is more progressive than their torture.
-- 
Yoshie

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